Page 167

We hit the ground. Rolling. Rolling. Rolling. A metal spear pierces through the dark cocoon. It stops an eyelash away from puncturing my eyeball.

Silence.

Oxygen comes through the tubes into my nose.

“Volga!” I murmur. “Volga…”

My arms are pinned to my body by the cocoon. My legs won’t budge. I feel some sort of knob by my right hand. I jiggle it to see what it does. A great farting sound releases the liquid from the crash pod and the darkness around me sags. Light pours in and I forget to breathe.

I’m dangling over the edge of a Martian fjord.

The front of the ship is completely gone. In the day’s last light, shards of it glint in the water hundreds of meters beneath. The rest of the ship is suspended above me at a straight vertical. It sways with the wind. Bits of body parts and fine china sprinkle down.

Bloodydamn.

The cocoon that saved me was some sort of black gel insulation from the chair itself. The outside of the cocoon looks like a pincushion. It is studded with three shards of metal the size of my legs. One missed piercing my heart by only a centimeter of insulation. A crash harness secures me to the seat, and keeps me from falling into the fjord. I can’t imagine Julii putting it on me.

I reach over the crashpod and grip the armrest before unbuckling the harness. I lurch downward, but manage to pull myself up over the seat. The ship sighs on its rocky perch. The movement upsets a half-pulverized corpse and it slides from the back of the ship toward me. I duck. It clips my shoulder and nearly takes me down with it.

I wince from the pain in my mangled hands and move as carefully as I can. Remains of what were once humans litter the compartment. “Volga? Volga!”

I feel like I’m looking for my sister amongst the corpses again. Looking for those blue shoes. Most of the crashpods are eviscerated by metal. Strangers fill them. I’m relieved to not find Victra’s other daughters here. Were they on the Pandora? Is their mother now just a wreck of bones on the ground?

I’ve no love for the Julii, but I grow nauseous all the same.

I flinch as another crashpod deflates with a hiss. Rigid gel becomes elastic, like a stick of black butter melting, and my friend’s face emerges from it. Her eyes wide and terrified as she sees the fjord beneath. She jerks sideways, causing the ship to rock.

“Volga, don’t move.”

We both freeze until the ship grows still again. Carefully, I pull my way over to her and help her with the crash harness. It takes us nearly five minutes to climb up out of the cabin toward the hole in the end of the ship. Once we reach daylight, we’re able to slide down the broken wing to the rocky ground below. Volga falls to her knees and kisses the frosted earth.

“No more ships,” she stammers. “No more ships.”

“Agreed,” I mutter.

The top of the fjord is littered with ship parts, and not just ours. The remains of several ripWings burn amongst coarse grass and frozen ponds. A fighter’s cockpit has part of an armored man hanging out. How did he get there? On a hill at the edge of a forest, another section of our ship smolders. Huge clouds consume most of the twilight sky. There’s flashes in orbit that I see between their gaps.

“Where are we?” Volga asks.

The sun sets behind mountains to the west. An expanse of fjords stretches to the east and north out to sea. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe the Daedalus Mountains. Or…” I search the mountains to the west and see the triple peaks of the Hydra’s Neck. I laugh in dismay. “We’re in the Cimmerian Highlands. Far north. These must be the Pyrrian Fjords.” I look south. A forest stretches across a misty land riddled with more fjords and jagged mounds of rock. Thousands of kilometers from here, the highlands taper away into endless plains and jungle belts.

“Cimmeria! You are home,” Volga says.

Home?

I shiver as frigid wind sweeps down from the north and cuts through my thin jacket easy as a knife. It is my planet. Yet I’ve never even seen snow before. And not a single person I love breathes its air—they are scattered across the system or buried beneath its dirt. It is a lonely feeling.

Mars does not feel like home.

“You need something to wear,” Volga says, taking a step toward our ship. Her foot dislodges a rock, which rolls and clicks against another, which rolls against the ship’s hull. There’s a sigh of metal and the ship tilts forward, losing its battle against gravity. With a groan, it slips over the edge of the fjord. Volga and I watch it crash into the water far below.

“Scary,” she mutters, and points toward the hillside where the back third of the ship lies in ruins. “We will go over there. There may be supplies and people who need help.”

I follow, but only because I don’t have a better idea.

By the time we make it to the second crash site, night has come in full, and my Julii-given shoes slosh with freezing water.

I can see better in the gloom than Volga, so I lead. The inside of the ship is a slaughterhouse. Dozens of crashpods were skewered with hunks of bent metal. Blood leaks from them to form a soup on the floor that thickens as it cools. There’s about squat-all chance anyone lived through this. Still, seems the human thing to look for survivors.